From that distance, the objects in question had something of the appearance of cherubs in some gaily coloured Gothic picture, with the yellow sky for their gold-leaf background. The parachute apparatus from which they hung and hovered was designed and coloured with the appearance of a great wheel of gorgeously painted plumage, looking more gaudy than ever in the strong evening light that lay over all. The more the two men in the quarry stared at these strange objects, the more certain it seemed that they were indeed pigs; though whether the pigs were dead or alive it was impossible at that distance to say. They looked down into the garden of the inn into which the feathered things were dropping, and they could see the figure of Joan Hardy standing in front of the old pig-sty, with her bird-like head lifted, looking up into the sky. “Singular present for a young lady,” remarked Crane, “but I suppose when our mad young friend does start love-making, he would be likely to give impossible presents.” The eyes of the more poetical Hood were full of larger visions, and he hardly seemed to be listening. But as the sentence ended he seemed to start from a trance and struck his hands together. “Yes!” he cried in a new voice, “we always come back to that word!” “Come back to what word?” asked his friend. “‘Impossible,’” answered Owen Hood. “It’s the word that runs through his whole life, and ours too for that matter. Don’t you see what he has done?” “I see what he has done all right,” answered the Colonel, “but I’m not at all sure I see what you are driving at.” “What we have seen is another impossible thing,” said Owen Hood; “a thing that common speech has set up as a challenge; a thing that a thousand rhymes and jokes and phrases have called impossible. We have seen pigs fly.” “It’s pretty extraordinary,” admitted Crane, “but it’s not so extraordinary as their not being allowed to walk.” And they gathered their travelling tackle together and began to descend the steep hill. In doing so, they descended into a deeper twilight between the stems of the darkling trees; the walls of the valley began to close over them, as it were, and they lost that sense of being in the upper air in a radiant topsy-turvydom of clouds. It was almost as if they had really had a vision; and the voice of Crane came abruptly out of the dusk, almost like that of a doubter when he speaks of a dream. “The thing I can’t understand,” he said abruptly, “is how Hilary managed to _do_ all that by himself.” “He really is a very wonderful fellow,” said Hood. “You told me yourself he did wonders in the War. And though he turns it to these fanatical ends now, it takes as much trouble to do one as the other.” “Takes a devilish lot more trouble to do it alone,” said Crane. “In the War there was a whole organization.”